Four Times Dr Reid Used Geographic Profiling
by angelcobra
Summary: Spencer Reid and Extreme Maps. Dr. Spencer Reid was the best geographic profiler in FBI history. But sometimes he got plain bored, and then he would set out to solve the world's most famous mysteries.


_Disclaimer: I don't own Criminal Minds or any of its characters_

_Summary: The Solutions to History's Greatest Mysteries Await the Genius of Dr. Spencer Reid_

**Four Times Dr. Spencer Reid Used Geographic Profiling (and One Time He Didn't)**

Rossi thought geographic profiling meant telling whether a person came from Boston or North Carolina.

Morgan thought geographic profiling was an exercise in coloring between the lines.

Hotch thought geographic profiling was an excellent excuse to keep Reid inside the police station and safe.

Prentiss hated geographic profiling after Reid took offense when she offered to help him with it in Houston.

Dr. Spencer Reid was the best geographic profiler in FBI history. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of geographic profiling. The ease and elegance of his profiles impressed everyone who saw them. Some of the local LEOs kept his maps as souvenirs or works of art after the BAU returned to Quantico.

Dr. Spencer Reid could narrow his triangles into smaller and smaller areas until they were no bigger than postage stamps.

Whether it was spotting a Fibronacci sequence (the kindergarten stuff) or deciphering hieroglyphics the Mayans would have envied, Dr. Spencer Reid could do it all.

But sometimes he got plain bored, and then he would set out to decipher the world's most famous mysteries.

**/One/**

On the night of August 6, 1930, Judge Crater and $5,150 in cash (the equivalent of $67,000 today) disappeared forever.

For years, he was known as "the missingest man in New York." He was last seen walking out of Bill Haas's Chophouse on West 45th Street, where he ate dinner with a showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz and a lawyer friend. Waving goodbye to his friends, he walked down the street and was never seen again.

Sally Lou Ritz, the judge's mistress, disappeared just weeks later.

What happened to the tall, heavyset New York Supreme Court associate justice and the money he pocketed after cashing two checks that morning remains a mystery. The massive investigation that followed revealed that Judge Crater's safe deposit box had been emptied as well.

An ace geographic profiler, such as Dr. Spencer Reid, would have been rightly skeptical of the notes left in 2005 by Stella Ferrucci-Good, after her death at the age of 91. In fact, as Dr. Reid would have immediately suspected, police found no skeletal remains under the boardwalk near West Eighth Street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where Stella's writing claimed the judge was buried.

No, Dr. Spencer Reid would know that Coney Island had no meaning for Judge Crater. Plotting the judge's every movement since birth on a map in his apartment, Dr. Reid would have quickly focused on a spot at the center of a triangle drawn between Crater's birthplace, Easton, Pennsylvania, his alma mater, Columbia University Law School, and his summer cabin in Maine.

On an August night in 2007, an observer might have seen a tall, thin man in his twenties, wearing a sweater vest despite the heat, slipping in and out of a long-deserted cabin on the shores of Lake Quinisigamond near Worchester, Massachusetts. That observer would have noticed that the man was carrying a briefcase just large enough to hold $5,000 in assorted bills.

If you asked Dr. Reid what he had been doing that weekend in August, he would have told you he spent it doing research in the library at M.I.T in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He might not have told you that at the rate of 20,000 words per minute, that research had taken all of 25 minutes.

**/Two/**

Not even the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, could crack the case of Ambrose Joseph Small. The short, dapper Canadian millionaire and theatre magnate was a daring gambler and notorious womanizer, who escorted glamorous showgirls around town, despite having a wife at home.

Small's disappearance on December 2, 1919, at the age of 56, set off the biggest manhunt in Canadian history.

Small had made plenty of enemies, including gamblers and gangsters. He had been accused of fixing races to cash in on his huge bets. He disliked children and the poor, decrying charity as "foolish."

Small had owned theatres in seven Ontario, Canada, cities. On December 1, 1919, Small sold all of his theatrical holdings, collecting $1,000,000 Canadian dollars in cash.

On December 2, his lawyer, F.W.M. Flock, met with Small at the Grand Opera House in Toronto. Flock left at 5:30 p.m., waving back at Small through a driving snowstorm. He would never see his client again.

The extensive police investigation uncovered no clues. The $50,000 reward offered by Small's wife, Teresa, brought psychics and spirit mediums flocking to the scene. Unlikely reasons advanced by these mystics included amnesia, murder by gangsters, and abduction by his private secretary, John Doughty.

Doughty, coincidentally, had vanished on the same day, absconding with $100,000 in bonds lifted from Small's safe deposit box. He was caught, but never charged with Small's disappearance.

A brilliant geographic profiler, such as Dr. Spencer Reid, would narrow the search to no more than a two-square mile area. Small had been on foot in a blizzard. He would quickly dismiss the affidavit of magician Harry Blackstone, Sr., that he had seen "Amby" playing roulette in a Juarez, Mexico, casino in 1920. Mexico was absurdly outside the comfort zone of Small, his family, and associates.

An FBI agent would suspect foul play. Small had vanished, but the million dollars was left behind. If Small had decided to simply walk away from his life, why wouldn't he have taken the money?

In the spring of 2008, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police received an anonymous tip. Acting on that tip, Mounties found the skeletal remains of an as yet unidentified male under an oak tree at the Convent of Precious Blood.

No one noticed the lean figure wearing a black pea coat and a purple scarf watching the proceedings.

Not coincidentally, the Convent stands in the center of a circle of red, blue, purple, and green pins pushed into an enlarged map of Toronto, hanging on the wall of an apartment in Washington, D.C.

**/Three/**

Dr. Spencer Reid could recite every word, comma, and punctuation mark in the FBI case files with the code name "Norjack." The official FBI theory was that the world's most famous aircraft hijacker did not survive his leap from a Boeing 727 on November 24, 1971.

Dr. Spencer Reid was inclined to agree with this theory. But regardless of the fate of the hijacker, one D. B. Cooper, the $200,000 in ransom he had parachuted with undoubtedly survived. The only question was where the moneybag had hit the ground.

On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man traveling under the name of Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305, flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. Described as being in his mid-40s, Cooper wore a dark suit, a white-collared shirt, a black necktie, black sunglasses, and a mother-of-pearl tiepin. Cooper sat at the back of the plane in seat 18C.

After takeoff, Cooper handed a note to a flight attendant. The note reportedly read, "I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. You are being hijacked." The note also demanded $200,000 in unmarked bills and two sets of parachutes - two main back chutes and two emergency chest chutes.

Northwest Airlines complied. When the plane landed in Seattle, the passengers were released. Cooper then told the pilot to taxi to a remote area of the tarmac and to dim the cabin lights to foil police snipers. A Northwest Orient employee delivered the $200,000 cash and the parachutes to a flight attendant, via the aft stairs.

At 7:40 p.m., the plane took off, headed for Reno, Nevada, at an altitude of 10,000 feet and a low airspeed of 200 m.p.h. (170 knots). The pilot flew on Victor 23, as shown on the Jeppersen air navigational charts, a low-altitude Federal airway that passed west of the Cascade Range.

Shortly after takeoff, the cockpit crew noticed a light flash, indicating Cooper had tried to operate the door. The crew noticed a change in cabin air pressure. Cooper had lowered the aft stairs and jumped out of the plane. He was never seen again.

Dr. Spencer Reid had memorized every detail of the FBI files, including the coordinates (45˚57'N 122˚39'W / 45.95˚N 122,65˚W) where Cooper was believed to have landed. If it had been that simple, Dr. Reid thought, the $200,000 ransom would have been found long ago. But months of search efforts conducted by the FBI and 200 Army troops from Fort Lewis had uncovered nothing.

A legendary geographic profiler, such as Dr. Spencer Reid, would relish the challenge. There were so many variables - air speed, altitude, gravity, wind speed, weather conditions, the precise time of the jump, to name only a few. Finding D. B. Cooper's ransom would be a geographic profiler's fondest dream.

Geographic profiling is highly subjective, based on the interpreter's experience and skills. No one had ever been more skilled than Dr. Spencer Reid.

A trapper canoeing down the Washougal River, near Cooper's projected drop zone, in the summer of 2010 caught a glimpse of a tall, lanky "tenderfoot" walking into the forest with a moneybag slung over his shoulder. The trapper blinked to clear his vision, but the slight young man was gone.

In September 2010, the Bennington Sanitarium in Las Vegas, Nevada, received a sizable endowment from an anonymous donor. A condition of the endowment was that a certain resident 15th century literature scholar receive only the best of care for the rest of her days.

**/Four/**

Treasure seekers have been scouring the Superstition Mountains, 35 miles east of Phoenix, Arizona, for the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine since 1892. It is arguably the most fabled lost mine in American history.

Thousands of cliffs, peaks, and mesas make up the Superstition Mountains. This collection rests on a plateau high above the surrounding terrain and bears such striking names as Geronimo's Head, Three Red Hills, Picacho Butte, Tortilla, Miner's Needle, and Bluff Springs. The Spanish explorers called them Sierra de la Espuma - "Mountains of the Foam."

Many believe the key to finding "the richest mine in the world" lies in the Peralta Stones. This set of engraved stones may be a treasure map that pinpoints the location of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine, supposedly discovered by a German immigrant, Jacob Waltz. The stones are named for the Peralta family, said to be the original discoverers of the mine, who were attacked and massacred by Apaches in or about 1850.

The stones consist of three tablets and a heart-shaped rock and were found in 1956. One stone, the Heart Map, is inscribed with the date 1847. It has a relief of a heart, that the heart-shaped rock fits perfectly. On the back is the chiseled shape of a cross.

The Horse and Priest Stone is a rectangular piece of sandstone weighing about 25 pounds. On one side is a carved horse next to the words, "El Cobollo de Santafe" in illiterate Spanish.

The Trail Map is carved with squiggly lines, zigzags that look like mountain peaks, the numbers 3 and 4, a capital letter F, an arrow, two "x"s, and a black dot in the upper left quadrant.

An astute scholar, such as Dr. Spencer Reid, would have been naturally skeptical that the stones were authentic. What would have given him pause, however, was the finding of the FBI labs in the late 1960s that the stones were more than 100 years old.

He wouldn't have been able to dispute the fact, either, that based upon his own vast knowledge of colonial Spain, the stones used the Spanish Alphabet Code, their Bible Code, and their Numbers Code.

The world's premier geographic profiler would know that the Peralta Stones alone could not provide the location of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. Of the thousands of gold seekers with knowledge of the stones, not one had uncovered so much as a nugget.

To supplement the Peralta Stones, Dr. Spencer Reid would have read every historical account, legend, boast, and blatantly bogus claim relating to the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. He would have studied USGS Topographic, Photoimage, Satellite Image, and Geologic Maps of the Superstitions.

Dr. Reid would have also lined up at least three other resources:

One clue would be what the Old Dutchman, Jacob Waltz, told a black woman, Julia Thomas, who owned a small store and restaurant in Phoenix. As he was lying sick-onto-death on a makeshift pallet in her living room, Waltz confided that "... the mine can be found at the spot on which the shadow of the tip of Weaver's Needle rests at exactly four p.m."

Dr. Spencer Reid would know that this shadow apex follows a fan-shaped area that ranges from a compass point of 91 degrees in the summer to 51 degrees in the winter.

A virtuoso geographic profiler would, therefore, also carry both a "wide angle" and a "telephoto" picture from atop Weaver's Needle, one looking toward Superstition Mountain and the other, away from Superstition Mountain.

Someone unaware that Dr. Reid consults for both the Department of Defense and NASA would not suspect what easy access Dr. Reid would have to such photos taken with pinpoint accuracy from outer space.

Dr. Reid would also know that countless men and women have died searching for lost gold in the Superstitions. They have died of dehydration, heat stroke, injury, or without rhyme or reason. Some have also been murdered, like Adolph Ruth, who vanished while searching for the mine in 1931. His skull - with two bullet holes in it - was recovered six months after he vanished.

It would take a brave man to venture into the Superstitions alone. His survival skills would be enhanced if he carried the title of "expert marksman," earned after months of obsessive practice on an FBI gun range.

In the fall of 2011, the pilot of a private plane spotted a lone male with chestnut hair and a pack-laden mule in the vicinity of Weaver's Needle. The young man looked up and waved before being lost from view in an arroyo.

In December 2011, the Arizona Mineral and Mining Museum in Phoenix announced it had received a donation generous enough to allow it to put the Peralta Stones on permanent display.

**/Five/**

And One Time Spencer Reid Didn't Use Geographic Profiling

No one in the casinos ever noticed the sickly-looking little 11-year-old with glasses. If they had, he would have said that he was trailing along behind his tourist parents.

Those were times when Spencer had taken a bus to the Strip and sneaked into casinos alone. On other occasions, he had visited the Bellagio with his older classmates on school field trips. Billed as "Behind the Scenes" looks at casinos, the trips were popular with Las Vegas school children.

The students were allowed to climb up to the casino catwalks and look down, through the one-way glass, on the activities at the gaming tables. Other highlights included seeing the "eye-in-the-sky" cameras, the banks of security monitors, the warren of hallways and tunnels running under the casino floor, money carts, and once, even the vault.

Spencer had used his supercomputer brain on every visit, mentally photographing the casino layout, filing away security codes he had seen punched in, and memorizing security guard shift changes. He drew blueprints from memory at home. When she noticed, _if_ she noticed, his mother thought he was learning how to be an architect.

In the end, a high-profile con man took all the credit. But those on the inside knew that the audacious gang that pulled off the spectacular heist at the Bellagio in 2001 should actually have been called "Spencer's Eleven."


End file.
